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Every so often we stumble across someone using video in a new and interesting way. One such customer is Denham The Jean Maker who have turned to video as a means of projecting their brand online. Whether that be through music, imagery or a simple story we liked what we saw so we spoke with Art Director, Ali Kirby at Denham who shared with us their creative story…

In one sentence what does Denhamthejeanmaker do?
Denham is primarily a jeans label built on experimentation and resourceful innovation. This is Jason Denham’s most fully realized personal vision but demonstrating his modest and sincere resolve to resist compromise

Why did you start to use video for your products? Any early learnings?
We started making videos to present new collections to sales agents at our bi-annual collection launch. These videos helped serve the purpose of visually explaining the processes involved in product design. Combined with relevant music. This interactive presentation got them enthused about the new collection. Video worked!

It was therefore a natural transgression to web for our end consumer to see the same videos. We learned very quickly that customers like to watch and appreciate the level of craft within each product so we set about creating content that matched that demand.

In terms of syndicating this content online we actually stumbled across vzaar whilst searching for a video hosting company that we could link into our site. What we like about vzaar is that the service recognizes the company’s that use vzaar do not necessarily want vzaar to self-advertise. Their integrity lies in respecting the online invisibility of the service they provide. This is unique.

The ElliptiGO is the world’s first outdoor elliptical road bike. The bicycle combines the best of running, cycling and the indoor elliptical trainer to deliver a high-performance, low-impact exercise experience.

Bryan Pate, Co-Founder of ElliptiGO Inc., and a vzaar customer for some nine months now, told us that for such a must-see product, video is essential and that the “bottom line is that for our product the video is the absolute best way to communicate what we’ve created because the instant someone sees it in action they understand it. It’s almost impossible to convey our product through text or even pictures.”

We let Bryan take up the story.

So how have you embraced video?

We primarily use video on the site. It purposefully dominates the homepage and screams play me! In addition we send out newsletters each month and many of the recipients come to the website to specifically watch the video. Whilst video-in-email remains an uncharted and unreliable marketing tactic, we do use the video on our iPhones and Blackberrys to facilitate explaining the bike in personal interactions. It’s like have a product demo in your pocket!

Tell us about the numbers

Attributing success to one video is always hard when you first bring your website to market, but at ElliptiGO we’re not only delighted with the 133% increase in visits (doubling previous traffic) but significantly the 30% increase in average time spent on the site. We attribute much of these improvements to an initial redesign of our site and prominent placement of our homepage video.

A further website redesign in November of this year resulted in an additional 18% increase in visits and a 50% increase in average time on site which underlines the work we have put into optimizing the positioning of the video and its call to action messaging. We added a call to action “Watch the 8S in action” and customers are doing just that we’re pleased to say.

We signed up to the vzaar Platinum package that gives us an unbranded video player and permission to stream 125GB per month. That means we can comfortably stream over 1,000 views a month and leave room for those nice unexpected bumps in traffic you get as a result of direct marketing!

Why vzaar?

We did a lot of research on different media players. We found that vzaar provided the best suite of options for the cost. We were particularly interested in having an unbranded player that we could size to the exact dimensions we were looking for. vzaar provided that for us and we’re happy so far.

Lights, Camera, Action!

We worked with a videographer who is also a professional tri-athlete to shoot our videos. Nothing like having an expert in the field to help shape how we show the product’s benefits. You only have to watch the video to see it has been money well spent. In addition, she’s very reasonable - about $1,500 for a full day of shooting plus video production for two videos. Furthermore, this is just the start as the business has done two shoots with her now so we’re getting better at accomplishing what we want and getting the right shots and shooting at the right time of day.

What next for video?

We strongly believe that web-based video is far and away the best method of demonstrating our product. So much so that we are planning to expand the use of video on our website including in the customer service and support sections that we’re developing.

Video plays track well with our overall traffic, so when there’s a spike in traffic, there’s a spike in plays. Furthermore we believe that everyone who has put down a deposit or invested in the company has watched the video, and that without the video we’d have no investors or customers from outside our headquarters region of San Diego, California. Video has allowed us to expand our geographies significantly. 2010 therefore promises to be an even more interesting year ahead as online video becomes more and more familiar and accessible.

In the last week we were delighted to see vzaar’s video solution picked to host and stream video content for Trebor Mint’s latest product launch, Trebor Minty Gum.

In the advert, Clinton, a trainee at Trebor, manages to invent an idea for a new Trebor mint gum during a press conference in a TV spot promoting the brands first foray into the chewing-gum market.

The spot is the first of several installments, which all feature the mint people at Trebor in glorious video. The fully integrated television, print and online campaign has been created by ad agency Fallon

Fallon have gone with our unbranded, borderless player and have added a final flourish by picking the green player that gives the video that fresh minty appeal that is so essential for the campaign.

Ellie Bailey of Fallon told us

We selected vzaar for the quality of the video streaming available, their personal attention to clients and the customisability of the platform. For instance, we can skin all of our videos in Trebor-green players! The service is very easy to use, and unlike YouTube, I can ensure that the videos aren’t visible/searchable outside of our own websites.

Get a taster for the promotion on the official Minty Gum website or enjoy the initial TV advert here:

Although there has been much hype published on the internet on the merits of online video for commerce, there is little actual data to back it up. It’s a difficult task to report actual conversions rates using video versus not using video, as larger companies guard this type of data and are not willing to share.

We therefore decided to take on the task, and report on how a few small businesses that use online product videos were getting on. (The full report can be downloaded at the bottom of this post)

It is often the case in challenging economic conditions, such as these, the small business that usually falls. Not so for these four companies, who were kind enough to share with me some data and experiences, which provide some insight into how their businesses are responding to the addition of online video to their web stores.

Equip2clean, one of these companies, who started using video after being urged by eBay and Google keynote speeches at various trade shows, reported its best month of trading in February 2009, and attributes its success to the product videos they create.

Jonathan Paxton, the owner of this commercial cleaning equipment company comments. “Our eBay sales immediately doubled on the products we listed video with. Our Big advantage is that most of our cleaning products sell well on video - we actually show them in use cleaning - we don’t talk too much about technical specification - we just let the customer see what it can do.”

Another company in the study, Diamond Jewellery United based in Antwerp Belgium, saw their sales increase by 65% four months after implementing product videos.

“Nearly all major websites only place a picture of a model, therefore leaving the buyer not sure what they are getting until they actually receive the diamond, and therefore resulting in a average of 30% returns amongst online jewellers. We have found that our videos give the customers a good idea of what they will be getting and thus our return rates are about 12%.” says Stephen Grunhut, the companies managing director.

Two other business in the study, Industry Recycles who sell second hand equipment, saw an increase in sales over 12 months by over 307%, and Yesil, an online furniture website, saw a 50% increase in web traffic transferring to a rise of 30% in sales over the same period.

If you have any results you would like to share please do. We would like to hear them. We are also keen to hear of any challenges you faced with video production and what you did to overcome them as Stephen Grunhut has done in the report.

For the complete case study download here: case study small businesses selling online with video.pdf

Thanks again to Equip2clean (UK), Diamond Jewellery United (Belgium), Industry Recycles (USA) & Yesil (UK) for your time and data.

Every now and then we like to showcase a customer and share with you their methods for success. This month we are casting our spotlight on Jonathon Paxton's business; Equp2clean, a UK based company offering high quality tools and equipment online. They specialise in indoor and outdoor cleaning equipment. Jonathan started using product video's on their website and eBay listings in August 2008 and since then have noticed and marked improvement in sales and customer service. Paxton the owner of the business states "Video has had a massive impact on my sales, in the past we used to rely on static photos now we include video on all our product listings because it gives the buyer more information." He adds "they can hear the item and see it working, we also get fewer questions about our products from callers" Jonathan goes on to say they when they purchase new equipment one of the prerequisites is for the product to video well. "We want products we can show off with video so they have to be photogenic"

Here are a selection of product videos from Equip2clean

Our latest business to be featured on our blog takes us into the world of cables, modems and power leads - the kind of world that video loves. Mmmmm electricity!

Al at cablestar has been selling online since early 2003 and first came to vzaar earlier on this year. We let him take up the story:

I first met the vzaar team at one of Channel Advisor’s Catalyst events having heard the concept of video in listings mentioned at an eBay University. We felt that it would be great to use video to promote our products and company, given that we sell to people who are quite technically minded. It’s such a simple idea - I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier!

Given the sheer range and volume of items we sell on our own website and on eBay, a shorter one off video that promoted our company, and designed to answer a few of the frequently asked questions we receive seemed the way to go. That way we could use the one asset a number of times and keep initial costs down. In addition, the video spokesperson we used has enabled us to quickly get across our core messages around prompt delivery time and customer refund policies. Our experience to date is that in some cases the customer doesn’t always read the copy on the page so we like the fact that we are also sharing that information more directly via video.

Adding video to our listings was a bit of a step into the unknown but we are pleased with results to date. Customer feedback has been very positive and we feel that our buyers enjoy the fact that they can see real people packing their orders. They get a feel for the company and who sits behind the company logo.

I was initially worried about how we’d add the video to our many many lines of stock but given that it was just pasting in some embed code we were up and running in a matter of hours. The unbranded player sits nicely alongside our frooition template and we certainly plan to introduce the video on to other platforms, such as Amazon and Pixmania in the near future.

On eBay two of our Detailed Seller Ratings have increased by 0.1% in the last 6 months which helps as strong DSR’s means better sales! They have also helped to keep us ahead of the competition in search which goes some way to ensuring our fees are as low as possible. With video it all adds up!

A new feature for us at vzaar, our Featured Business post allows us to share with you the success enjoyed to date by businesses who embrace video as a means to drive online sales.

So first up is Silver level vzaar seller Diamond Jewelry United who sell under the guise of bestprices_ms on eBay.

Bestprices, a diamond seller based in Belgium, sell diamond jewellery on eBay using vzaar. The firm has been in the diamond business for forty years and started selling diamond jewellery two years ago. They started selling on eBay in 2007 but only started making serious inroads in January this year when they started listing items daily.

Listing hundreds of quality items a month, all of which carry video, they have no doubt that videos help them sell more. That’s because when it comes to selling precious, high value items inspiring confidence and trust is vital for attracting buyers. “Although more people are buying diamond jewellery online every day,’ says the Managing Director Steven Grunhut, “it is still very risky as people are never 100% what they are getting because no 2 diamonds are alike.”

As well as inspiring trust, Steven believes vzaar videos a have given him a critical edge because despite being relatively new to eBay he’s already successfully competing with established sellers. “We have realized that there are hardly any online jewellers that are using this technology. When we started selling jewellery on eBay we had a tough time getting to the top, however once we started using vzaar our sales improved and within weeks we were competing with the top sellers in our category.”

Bestprices integrate the videos into their HTML listing templates meaning that the video is prominent and attractively integrated to best effect: Steven claims that each video only take about 5 minutes to create and drop into their individual template. In order to show off the diamond jewellery, Bestprices have also invested in some new video equipment and special lighting, but as their superb videos and increased selling success testifies, it was well worth it.